Redirect Advice

Hey got an argument going in the office right now (Same as any other day...)

We've just completed a site and the client has asked the following, I'd appreciate your thoughts/suggestions.

He wants an internal page used as the home page.
newsiteurl/internal-page replaced by oldsiteurl

We have produce a splash page to allow visitors to choose as section of the site, he has requested the following.
newsiteurl replaced by oldsiteurl/index.html

He added this statement regarding the 2 old site urls
The 2 old site URL's are in fact duplicate pages - it is the first that has generic presence - so the second could be used for the index page if it has any ranking - if not I would discard it & use:

2. I don't advise using an internal page as a home page. It's bad for user experience and as such, can potentially hurt SEO.

If for some reason you decided to keep both urls you would need to use the canonical meta tag to avoid duplicate content penalty. Ideally, you might want to play it safe and block 1 of the urls using robots.txt exclusion protocol.

Google --> splash pages hurt sales

and you'll see loads of stories on how conversions drop off the map and sales tank when using a splash page.

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